By Jason Wojciechowski on March 12, 2008 at 3:38 AM
Barry M. Bloom, for MLB.com, wrote this about Greg Smith's outing today: "Smith may be setting the pace. It was his third appearance on Tuesday and just his second start. He threw 44 pitches and was so eager when he was removed from the game that he went down to the bullpen and tossed another 16 pitches." Isn't that last sentence wrong? In modern spring trainings, guys are set to throw x pitches in a particular outing in order to keep on track to be ready for the season. If they get through a bunch of innings in fewer than that number of pitches, but the team needs to pull them in order to get other guys work as well, they head down to the bullpen and finish out their pitch allotment down there. That's what happened here, I'd assume. After all, if he was "so eager", then why 16 pitches? That's a strange number, isn't it? Well, it's not strange if you consider that his total pitch count for the day would thus be 60.